ansible bootstrap/kickstart/export/offline/installer mode

Archives Ansible Developer
,
1

Ansible became a very convenient tool for different systems setup. However it still requires ansibleto run playbooks and that’s sometimes a series limitation.

One of the examples is AWS ASG – you can install ansible on a local nix host and run playbook locally but that’s too complicated. And there’s no way to handle this on windows.

I suggest creating an export option that would produce a single python/powershell script that could be used without ansible. It’s clear some modules and approaches won’t work or will be limited in this mode (like delegate_to) but that’s much better than nothing.

2

As a counter-solution to that approach, the kubespray project demonstrated that with just a little bit of scripting and the raw: module, one can relatively quickly provision ansible onto the target machines, then switch execution over to it as one would normally. We do that very trick using the user-data in EC2 launch situations, bootstrapping CoreOS on PyPy (although we use portable-pypy because it whines less about the shared libraries when running). I would fully expect ASG would work fine, also.